Super Stock

I love making stock so much that it's probably the most enjoyable part of cooking a chicken. It's cheap, delicious, can be altered in a thousand ways so it's never dull, and is the basis of innumerable great dishes.


With the carcass of a roast chicken to use up last week it actually fell to the Dear Leader (may her detractors shrivel like salted slugs) to start the stock off, a rare foray into the kitchen other than in an advisory capacity. To the carrots, onions, ginger and bay leaves she had incorporated I added a few rather tired but usable sticks of celery, a head of our own garlic, one of the few left from a disappointing season, and a load of spices - black cardamom pods, red and black peppercorns, some coriander seed, a star anise, some allspice berries... The more flavour you put in, the more you get out.


Once the initial albumen scum has been cleared from the surface, watching it give occasional little blips is a therapeutic exercise, repeated over a good two and a half hours as the liquid simmers ever so gently to maximise the flavour without clouding up. The aroma wafting up through the house is another mood lifter. And of course the end product is life-enhancing - tasty, complex, savoury, like a good wine but without the after-effects. As soon as the cooking is over I like to strain the liquid off the veg and bones, as left to cool on them it can develop some stale undertones.


As you'd expect with an ingredients list like that, the first use I made of the finished article was in a Chinese dish, a mushroom and vegetable-rich noodle soup-cum-stew into which, inauthentically, we stirred spoonfuls of the Mexican-inspired chili sauce made by Sternest Critic to preserve our bumper chili crop remains. A good soup needs a very good stock - I recall (probably not for the first time, my apologies) Chris Johnson, then owner of The Village Restaurant in Ramsbottom, being very upset that having paid £20  (and this in the early Nineties) for a bowl of soup in an extremely famous French restaurant owned by an extremely famous French chef, the stock was watery and boring. It spoiled what should have been - if critics were to be believed - the meal of a lifetime.


No such problem with our bowl of Chinese-y goodness. It was warmly spicy, onion sweet, and deep in colour and flavour. Satisfying to the palate, soothing on the stomach, and warming for the soul - and for pennies.

The Joy of Stocks

Making stock is one of life's simplest culinary pleasures. It fills the house with a comforting smell (unless it's lamb, which I tend not to bother with), and as a near freebie warms the heart of the austerity cook.

Earlier in the week with son suffering with severe yoot flu I made a chicken broth for our evening meal having prepared the stock in the afternoon using the well-picked carcase of a roast bird. Anyone who believes there is no difference between real stock and a cube has yet to make the real stuff. Same son, aka Sternest Critic, can always tell if I make risotto with the cheaty option.

Yesterday I got around to making some beef stock with the bones and bits from Sunday's roast. It was getting near the time when I would no longer trust it, and Friday being shopping day we needed to clear some room in the fridge. Chicken stock I make in about an hour, as simmered too long it can go a bit gluey; beef can bubble modestly for three or four hours.

The bones were joined by four bay-leaves, a large onion quartered, two sticks of celery and the leaves of several more, a carrot in thick diagonal slices (to give plenty of surface area), with several cloves of garlic, about 12 peppercorns, and two flowers of star anise. Not sure if that is what they should be called but they look like it. Three hours - and a half-teaspoonful of salt - later we have the liquid makings of a Chinese noodle soup, kept in the fridge overnight so the beefy fat can be skimmed off (and probably used in cooking something else, or maybe just on a sliver of toast).

Years ago Chris Johnson, who in Ramsbottom since the 1980s has run the best restaurant in the North West under various different names - the original was The Village Restaurant - told us about a trip to I think a Paul Bocuse eaterie. He had been terribly disappointed, and was scathing about a soup tried there, with as he put it 'no depth' to the stock. He seemed saddened that such a hero of the food world should have erred in so basic a fashion. That depth is in fact really easy to achieve even in the home kitchen, so I can understand Chris's dismay, leaving aside what had been paid for the bowlful.